Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation

Chapter 1: CONVERSING ABOUT FAITH AND MEDIA IN AMERICA

1 Conversing about Faith and Media in America P P P Alexis de Tocqueville recalled reading a news story during his visit to the United States in the 1830s about a court in New York where a witness declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. As a result of the witness’s confession, the judge refused “to accept his oath, given, he said, that the witness had destroyed in advance all the faith that could have been put in his words.” Apparently astonished by the story, Tocqueville added to his report the fact that the newspaper offered no commentary about the judge’s decision.1 Tocqueville wondered how a witness’s account of an event could be disregarded simply because the witness did not believe in God. The whole matter astonished Tocqueville but apparently caused little amazement to the reporter who covered the trial. American democracy depends on religion, but not on any particular religious institutions. Religion in the United States is not fundamentally about church-building programs and theological education, although it certainly includes these kinds of endeavors. Nor is religion largely the pronouncements of Rome, the synodical meetings of Presbyterians, or the conventions of Baptists. As Tocqueville concludes, religion in America 7 includes dynamic cultural activities anchored deeply in the practices of the people. New World Christianity, writes Tocqueville, is “democratic and republican .” Each sect, he observes, “adores God in its manner, but all sects preach the same morality in the name of God.” As a result, Tocqueville concludes, “America is . . . the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine powers over souls; and nothing shows better how useful and natural to man it is in our day, since the country in which it exercises the greatest empire is at the same time the most enlightened and most free.”2 American religious life is like an ongoing discussion, intimate but openended and regulated by social propriety. Sharing what Tocqueville calls “an ostensible respect for Christian morality and equity,” Americans join together in religious conversations about who they are and where they are headed as a nation.3 The American future is wide open, just like the outcome of a rich and meaningful conversation among friends. Without the burden of the particularity of one tradition, Americans are nor inclined to pay full obeisance to the past. Instead they imagine together a future that is possible, even if not probable. Sometimes such imagining is deeply religious , as within a tribe, whereas other times it is more broadly nonsectarian . In both cases Americans frequently have perceived the hoped-for future in religious metaphors and language. Americans have always seen their collective future partly in the sermons and postworship discussions across the land, in the daily prayer of millions of individuals, and especially in the heart-felt religious enthusiasms of citizens. Religion is still a major part of the unregulated conversation that makes America democratic and republican. American Christianity, too, is not like a scripted sermon or carefully crafted lecture but rather like a conversation played out on the public stages of porch, pew, and religious periodical. The conversation occurs in all types of media, from pulpits to newspapers and from electronic media to cyberspace. Whereas in many countries peoples’ religious life is purely personal, private, and traditional—anchored largely in the ossified rituals of the past—in the United States matters of faith have always been part of the ongoing discourse of public as well as private life. James W. Carey, one of the most astute communication theorists and historians in America, argues that the freedoms mentioned in the First Amendment—religion, speech, press, and assembly—are together a “compact way of describing a political economy.” The amendment, according to Carey, says “that people are free to gather together without the intrusion of the state or its 8 Quentin J. Schultze representatives. Once gathered, they are free to speak openly and fully. They are further free to write down what they have to say and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance.” Freedom of religion, he adds, was absolutely crucial for maintaining this open process of organizing, speaking, and recording Americans’ thoughts: “Of all the freedoms of public life in the eighteenth century, freedom of religion was, perhaps, the most difficult liberty for Americans to adjust to. . . . No one could be excluded from...